Tactical retreat - Bill Clinton's defense budget

National Review, May 10, 1993 by Vin Weber

Soon after taking office, President Clinton announced his intention to cut the U.S. defense budget dramatically. But when he finally released his first defense budget on March 27, the deep cuts expected in Reagan/Bush-era weapons programs hadn't materialized. "What we're doing is kind of treading water," said Defense Secretary Les Aspin.

What happened? Why did the Administration release what it termed a "holding budget" instead of going ahead with the cuts?

The stated reason was to conduct a "bottom-up" strategic review of U.S. defense needs in the post-Cold War era. But the real reason was nothing so noble--as evidenced by a confidential memo written for Aspin by Frank Wisner, an assistant defense secretary designate. "The major goal," Wisner wrote, "is to establish a broad, stable political consensus" for the cuts--i.e., to sell the cuts to an outraged Pentagon and conservative Democrats in Congress.

President Clinton was already unpopular with the military for his decision to allow open homosexuals into their ranks. Now the deep cuts he proposed--cuts of $122 billion over four years, twice as much as he had suggested on the campaign trail--had opened yet another wound. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came out publicly against his Commander-in-Chief's plan, calling it "fundamentally flawed," and stating "the forces and capabilities it proposes are unbalanced." The uproar led Wisner to warn Aspin in his secret memo that the Joint Chiefs "can only be moved so fast...too quick a pace will make them, and the chairman, balk."

Conservative Democrats in both houses of Congress also went on a very public and vocal campaign against the cuts. Senator Sam Nunn (D., Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, led the charge. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, Nunn stated outright, "We're moving too rapidly." And on CNN's Newsmaker Saturday, he complained: "We have been dealing with numbers grabbed out of the air. No one knows where all these cuts are going to come from..."

His House counterpart, Representa Clinton at the White House, McCurdy told the President point blank: "Unless you slow down the tempo of operations we're going to have a hollow force by this time next year."

Nunn and McCurdy were making a lot of noise. But how much support did they have among their colleagues? Senate Republicans quickly offered a test, in the form of an amendment limiting reductions in Pentagon spending.

The Clinton lobbying team went into full swing. According to one senior Pentagon official, Aspin "bust[ed] his butt and some of ours" to shore up wavering support for the Clinton cuts. The lobbying worked. While Nunn and three colleagues crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans, the Administration succeeded in making the vote a question of party loyalty, and thus defeated the measure 58 to 41.

But the victory was a hollow one, reflecting not so much support for the Clinton plan as the willingness of Senate Democrats to support their President in one of his first legislative battles. Lest the Administration misread the vote, Nunn fired two shots across the Clinton bows. He introduced two non-binding "Sense of the Senate" resolutions, one making it harder to use additional Pentagon cuts to pay for new spending; a second calling on the Administration to restore defense funds if savings anticipated from low inflation and cuts in federal salaries fail to materialize. The resolutions both passed by strong margins, the second by a mile-wide vote of 69 to 30.

Faced with such strong opposition, Clinton backed down, and Aspin made his announcement of the "holding" budget. Seemingly Nunn, McCurdy, and Powell had won their point, and Aspin had agreed that cuts had to be based on a real review of defense needs in the post-Cold War era.

But the Administration's retreat was a tactical one putting off the battle for another day. As the Wisner memo indicates, the real goal of the strategic review is not to assess U.S. defense needs, but to establish a consensus for the cuts. The review seems likely to be driven, not by the needs of our national defense, but by the needs of Clinton's budget.

Bill Clinton has staked the success of his Presidency on his economic plan. And the President is counting on defense cuts to pay for 85 per cent of that plan. He can't get the money from further taxes instead. He is already raising taxes to pay for his stimulus. And when his health-care plan is announced, he will have to raise taxes again to pay for that. Even Bill Clinton knows he can't raise taxes three times in one year. That leaves deeper cuts in domestic spending, which are not likely. The question of defense cuts is thus not "if" but "how."

The irony is that a real strategic review is desperately needed. In recent weeks, we've learned what a dangerous place the post-cold War world may be: North Korea may be on the verge of assembling nuclear weapons; South Africa announced it had secretly assembled nuclear weapons in the 1980s; a New Yorker expose revealed that, in 1990, India and Pakistan were on the verge of actually waging a regional nuclear war; and events in Moscow give rise to fears that the former USSR's nuclear arsenal could one day fall into the hands of authoritarian leaders.